


When We Are Human

by Lobelia321



Series: Arthropods [5]
Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-30
Updated: 2013-04-30
Packaged: 2017-12-09 18:12:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/776466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lobelia321/pseuds/Lobelia321
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We are lying here in bed together, formicating.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When We Are Human

**Author's Note:**

> An experiment with point of view. Thanks to Belinda and Tamaranth who made me think through words. Thanks to Brenda who made me think beyond words.

Title: When We Are Human

Series: Fifth and last in the Arthropods series; follows "Beetle in a Box". 

Author: Lobelia <lobelia40@yahoo.com>

Website: http://blithesea.net/lobelia/

Pairing: Dominic Monaghan / Karl Urban

Rating: R

Summary: We are lying here in bed together, formicating.

Feedback: Yes, please, I would love feedback! Anything, even if it's only one line, one word!

Content/Warnings: RPS. Weird povs. Creepy-crawlies galore. Meta-fiction.

Spoilers: None whatsoever.

Archive Rights: Beyond the Fellowship. My niche. Anyone else, please just ask.

Disclaimers: This is a work of amateur fiction. I do not know these people. I am not making money. The events described in this story did not happen.

Author's Notes: An experiment with point of view. Thanks to Belinda and Tamaranth who made me think through words. Thanks to Brenda who made me think beyond words.

\----------------

Let us be a moth.

Let us grow soft downy wings and a squat feather-furred body. Let us look at the room we are in through compound eyes. We need to get used to this way of seeing: not through two pupils swivelled military-style always to the front, but with eyes out to the sides, twin domes, myriad facets glinting in the dark like cut diamonds. 360 degree vision. It's a different spectrum, too. In fact, we can't make much sense of anything. Things are dark. Things are fuzzy. Something moves very fast near the back of our heads. We haven't got a clue what it is. We haven't yet got full moth-mastery. What we _can_ do, however, is to fly. We just give a little push with those teeny-weeny hind feet, wiggle our remaining four legs, and off we go.

Hey, this is cool. The wings are doing their wing-thing, our feelers are waving frenetically, air swoops by. We're not eagles or anything. Our aim could be better, and our flight path weaves drunkenly. But we are airborne. We're up there. We're flying!

We see a shiny thing from up here. A flickering, burning, beckoning, very-very bright thing. All our instincts urge us towards this light, glowing thing. It's down there in the corner, near the window; it's dancing, it's drawing us, we're coming down. Down, down...

A voice says, "Look at that kamikaze moth."

On second thoughts, let's not be a moth. Moths are very humble of brain. They are at the mercy of too many things, and their lives are too, too short.

Let's be a mosquito instead.

Let's be a predator. Fleet-footed, sleek-jawed, antennae elegantly poised. Always on the move. Speedy, light, bloodthirsty. We can sense that blood, oh yes, we can. There's lots of it about. Gallons and oceans. We just need to home in on it.

The room is full of creatures but we're not interested in them. We're not interested in that stupid big moth, letting out a spiralling belch of fume as it sizzles to her death. We're not interested in that irritating intruder from before, that big bastard of a beetle, aggressive son of a bitch, muscling in on our territory.

We're only interested in those big hot beasts down there, down where the moth met her maker. They're making fire again, those beasts, but we're not distracted by that, or only a little bit. The sense of blood fills our tiny heads. Blood rises off the beasts like a drugged cloud.

"There," says one of them, in the low, booming voices of the very large. "Did you hear it this time? Nnnnnnn."

We can't help ourselves. The excitement of the blood is making us produce that high-pitched whine, like an electric saw at the edge of consciousness. The beasts don't like that whine. One of them gets up and starts swatting the air with a rolled-up fabric thing of some sort. He's bare-chested, we can perceive the sweat on his skin and the blood pulsing just underneath it. He's swinging his puny weapon through the air. Very ineffectually. We are much too fast for him. We are cunning.

Oh, to land on that epidermis. To sink our proboscis into that outer layer of skin, to penetrate into the dermis, past follicles and sebaceous glands, into the delicious boiling rivulets just below the surface, and then to slurp ourselves full of the stuff, to suck, to swallow, nothing like it in the entire world...

But no, no, hang on. Mosquitoes. Who'd be a mosquito? Whining little fucks and dumb as shit. One thwack with a T-shirt, wound into a tight rope, and a mosquito's no more than just a flat smear of blood on the wallpaper. Not worth mandibles.

No, I know. Let's not be an insect at all. Let's be a spider.

Now a spider, that's really something worth shrinking to eye-size for. We get to have eight legs, furry too, and wonderfully strong and agile they are. They have tiny claws at the tips of their tarsi which means that we can cling and climb. We can walk upside down on the ceiling, just for the sheer heck of it. We feel like Spiderman, only better, the real thing. And no hysterical whining about like that dumb ex-mozzie on the wall. We don't fly like stupid insects. We lurk. We bide our time. We crawl into the corner where cornice meets cornice.

We crunch our fangs together and pinpoint our beady eyes with precision. And then, oh wow, what's that exquisite sensation? There's something at the base of our big blobby abdomen. Two tiny glands, spinnerets, pleasure spots, and they're squeezing, squeezing... oh yes, long, sticky filaments of silk. We'd forgotten about that. Our spider web. It oozes out of the back of us, in ecstatic spurts. We can lift off now. We can abseil down on our arachnidal rope. We can hang still in the air above the two creatures on the bed below us.

One thing we can't do, though, is to hear what they're saying. Well, we can hear something but it's of such sonic booming wavelength that it might as well be a recording played backwards. And we certainly can't understand what is being said. Come to think of it, we couldn't when we were a moth and a mosquito, either. We were just imagining that we could.

Alas, we lack the gift of speech and the gift of understanding. We hang, suspended in mid-air, alert to all the creepy-crawlies of the world. (For we do not know that this is not the world but just a tiny box-shaped part of it.) We are alert to all the juicy morsels flitting and flying and scurrying through the darkness, some on their inevitable route staight into our net.

We are alert to all of that but human speech?

Sorry. Pass.

So let us sigh in resignation and let's be a mammal, after all. Because we didn't actually like being a spider, did we? We didn't really like having all those spindly legs and that bloodless body, those hairy claws and that compulsion to move so quickly and erratically, so creepily-crawlily. Because, let's face it, although we were perfect when we were arthropods, we much prefer to be imperfect and warm-blooded.

Let's grow a spine. Feel the vertebrae buckling our long backs. Feel the exoskeleton fall away, leaving our feeble outer layer exposed to the breeze that's coming in through the open window and vulnerable to the buzzings of the night. Feel ourselves grow heavy and big. Ah yes, we love this, don't we? We love to be able to stretch around our tall, sturdy endoskeletons. We love the way our blood courses through our arteries and veins, and the way sweat gets caught in the hairs under our armpits.

Who shall we be? Let's be Karl.

Because we've wanted to be Karl, haven't we? We've wanted to inhabit that body and, especially-especially, we' ve wanted to see into that mind. We've wanted to know what's motivating him, what's spurring him on to keep coming round to Dominic's house, to look at all those crabs and ants and spiders, to collect a beetle and to come knocking at Dominic's window in the middle of the night. What _is_ all that about? We are desperate to know.

We haven't wanted to be uselessly buzzing through the air or crawling along the walls. All along, we've wanted to be down here where the action is. We've wanted to be in this bed with Dominic. We've wanted to be the one to strain our ears over the sound of a mosquito. We've wanted to bend over the side of the bed and find the matches and strike a light and stare wildly into the shadows, catching glimpses of the helicoptering vampire. But most of all, we've wanted to strike those matches in order to cast an eighteenth-century glow over Dominic's profile. Because, let's admit it, although we can appreciate the poetry of crabs, the weirdness of ants, the sadness of spiders and the beauty of beetles, what we truly love, in the final analysis and when push comes to shove, that is our own species.

We love the warmth radiating off the skin of our species. We love the large, non-facetted eyes of our species, a white almond framing two concentric circles that look back at us. We love the lashes surrounding the eye, and we don't care, we don't think, we don't give a stuff about the hundreds of mites munching their way through those lashes. And we love the thick muscular arms, unjointed, smooth-skinned, softly blond in the intermittent light of the matchflame.

But the thing we love most of all, the thing we have really been missing when we were arthropods, was that large, lobed, beautiful, wakeful brain, encased safely in its bony cranium.

Now that we are Karl, what we really-really want to feel are the workings of his cerebrum: the impulses crisscrossing his meninges, the vibrations running through the furrows and convolutions of his frontal lobe, the ceaseless computations and calculations and stimulations, the chemicals oozing from one synapse to the next, the firing of neurons, the excitation of axons, the meanderings of engrams, the infinitely subtle variations among dendrites.

In short: what is Karl thinking?

The first coherent thought we encounter is a complete surprise:

'I wish I were a beetle.'

What? A beetle? We've just been there! We don't want to go there again! Not back to that sub-human existence of flittings and flutterings! No way! What sort of a thought is this?

But then we come to. Then we pay attention. We become more used to being Karl. We forget about having been an insect. And we realise that Karl, of course, does not really want to be a beetle. What he wants to be is something that captures Dominic's attention in the way that green little beetle did. No, not what _he_ wants: what _we_ want. For _we_ are Karl now. We _are_ Karl.

We are Karl and we want Dominic to look at us with those eyes of rapture that he turned on greenus beetlus. We saw those eyes of rapture by the matchlight; we saw them in profile, devoted to the beetle in the box in his hand; we want them to turn _en face_ and be devoted to us.

But that is not all we are wanting. The second surprise comes as we get more comfortable in Karl's mind. We had expected clear-cut feelings and straightforward motivations but what are we getting? As soon as we are Karl, and in Karl's body and in Karl's mind, we are thwarted from discovering the ordered sequence of thoughts we'd been hoping for. We had been under the illusion that the logic of Karl was hidden from us while we were still moths or mosquitoes, but now we find that it eludes us still. Karl's head, _our_ head, is a skein of conflicting urges and yearnings, trivialities and redundancies, foreground thought-bites and background static.

One of the foreground thoughts was 'I wish I were a beetle', but that has stuttered past now, that was just an ephemeral blip and is replaced by other blips crowding in on our consciousness. We feel, for example, the pressure of urine in our bladder, not a very strong pressure but just enough to make us want to get up and go to the loo; but at the same time, we don't want to leave the bed we're in, it's the last thing we want. We also feel a slight burning on our right thumb and forefinger where the matches singed our skin, and a niggling pulling sensation in the corner of our left middle nail, where a bit of skin has worked itself loose after having got snagged in the bricks outside, and every now and again we are compelled to pick at the skin with the thumbnail of our left hand -- just a minor irritation, but nevertheless.

We flex our hand, our wonderful human hand, not a skinny little claw but a big, smooth-boned tool with phalanges, carpals, metacarpals, fate lines and heart lines, mounts of Venus and amphibian folds between each finger, and wonderfully sensitive fingerprinted pads at the tips of each digit. What we want most all of a sudden, the urge that rushes into the foreground, is to press those pads against Dominic's skin. Right now. We yearn to do this. We burn to do this, just as we burned to dive into that flame when we were still a moth. But we're not a moth now. Because we're not doing what we want. Nothing could have stopped us as a moth. But now we burn to touch Dominic and at the same time we don't want to touch Dominic. We're no longer the slaves of our instincts. We have become a complicated, strange being, who wants and doesn't want and who's trapped in the middle between these contradictory urges.

We feel weirdly human.

We become aware of something else. Something on our belly: a thick, hard erection. Wow. We've never had one of those before. Because before we were Karl, before we were moths and spiders even, we used to be women readers. Yes, we did. We used to imagine what it would be like to have a dick, having a hard dick and sticking that hard dick into other boys, rubbing our hard dick up against others' hard dicks... oh, just remembering our imaginings makes our present Karl-erection jump to attention.

We enjoy the erection but we also don't enjoy the erection. We're trying to shield the erection from Dominic. We desperately want to rub our erection up against Dominic but the last thing on earth we want is for Dominic to discover our hard erection.

Definitely moth no longer. Oh, why, why is it so difficult being human? Why aren't we finding out what Karl really-really wants now that we _are_ Karl? Why is Karl's brain such a mishmash of pros and cons? Why is Karl's body so out of control and yet reined in on a much tighter leash than we're happy with?

But what are we actually doing? Well, we're sitting upright, the quilt covering our erection, our bare chest exposed to the mozzies, and we're lighting a match. We scrape it away from us along the surface of the matchbox's side, with a practised flick of the wrist, as if we've done this a hundred times before in our life. Which, of course, we have. Unlike the arthropods, we have had many years of life so far and have practised many things; we have had countless things happen to us in our life, countless different things, but none, not one as far as we can remember, has been as nice as sitting next to Dominic in his bed and lighting matches to frighten away the bloodsuckers.

"Is this the last match?"

That is a voice, a human voice, a beautiful human sound, and we hear it with our delicately whorled ears and we understand it perfectly.

We answer. We vibrate our vocal cords and palpitate our tongues. We say, "Yeah."

"Look," says Dominic. "There's a spider."

What? We look up. In the orange flamelight, the spider looks huge and black. It's hanging off the ceiling. It's dangling right above our head.

The flame goes out. Our skin burns.

There is a crawling sensation in the groove of our nape. A squeal chokes in our throat. We jerk up and frantically brush at our neck and shoulders. It's an instant response, the age-old human response to the creepy-crawly stimulus.

"What?" says Dominic, and we are just a tiny-tiny bit put out by the amused tone of his voice.

"I think that bloody spider just dropped down my neck," we say.

Dominic laughs. "Do you mean this spider?" he says. There's the crawly sensation again, on our nape.

"Oh," we say. "Yeah. Could have been the real one, though."

"Could have," admits Dominic and continues to crawl his fingers up our nape and down our nape. "But there's no point in being nervous. There's no point in flinching."

"I'm not flinching now," we point out. And we're not. We're stock-still.

"Okay," says Dominic.

He starts creepy-crawling his fingers further up our neck, into our hair, tickle-scuttling across our scalp, across the top of our right ear, along our cheek, down to our chin and shoulder bones. We don't move a muscle. We don't flinch despite the creepy-crawling sensations all over our skin.

Formication. Dominic is formicating us.

We formicate back. We make small erratic scrawly-scribbles on Dominic's forearm. We scratchy-crawl all the way up his arm, around his shoulder, into the hair in his armpits. Our fingernails leave a trail of brick dust on Dominic's skin. Our fingers are crabs and ants and spiders.

Dominic doesn't flinch once.

Our fingers continue to crawl over Dominic, and his fingers continue to crawl over us. We are lying here in bed together, formicating.

Our fingers spread out a little. We withdraw the claws. We're now using the pads of our fingers. Finally-finally, we press our fingerpads into Dominic's soft hot skin. We dribble them along his dermis, along that lovely human sheath, under which rush all those little blood corpuscles and red cells and white cells necessary to keep him alive next to us. Dominc's fingers splay out, too. His hand is on our bare stomach now. He is making circles with the balls of his palm: clockwise, counter-clockwise.

We've got our eyes closed. It's dark but we don't even want the darkness to distract us from the formication of Dominic's hand. Or the hardness and softness of Dominic's skin. We squeeze his skin. We blow on his neck. We hear a gulped hiccup at the back of his throat. The hiccup reminds us of our erection; we'd almost forgotten about that, temporarily. But now that we remember, we also think of Dominic's groin, and our hand travels down, down Dominic's chest, dribble-drabble, down Dominic's belly, fingers tiptoeing, all the way down --

\-- and then Dominic flinches.

"There," we whisper. "You flinched."

"That's allowed," says Dominic.

Then we flinch, too, and Dominic says again, "That's allowed."

We didn't know there were rules, and maybe there aren't, maybe Dominic's just making them up as we go along, making them up only to break them instantly, and we do, we break them, one by one, over the next hours, throughout the next lifetime. We break them if only for the pleasure of hearing Dominic say, one by one, "That's allowed", and "Yes, that's allowed," and "Oh yes, that... oh..."

We break rules and we flinch until the first birds come out. They cheep and screech outside the window. One of them, not ten metres from the house, swoops down and in one efficient dive-and-snap snatches up our greenus beetlus from its perch atop a blade of grass, and crunches him in its barbed beak. It doesn't matter, though. We will think of another present. We no longer need an excuse to visit Dominic the next day.

It's a dog-eat-dog world out there. It's tough being an arthropod. All over the yard, creatures are chomping up other creatures, creatures are nervously monitoring movement with their multi-focal eyes, creatures are scuttling away in a panic and reproducing in a loveless rush.

In our bed, mites migrate between our eyelashes.

"Do that again," we whisper, open-mouthed.

\----------------

The End of this series.

30 July 2002 

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